Web and Tech

This blog is migrating…

Like the Baltimore Colts (for all you serious football fans), I have packed up the U-Haul in the middle of the night and moved. But I would hate to think of people waking up, racing to check my blog, and finding out it wasn’t there. I know that would be devastating for millionsthousandsa couple of dozen lonely souls you. So, please note, and change your bookmarks, that you can find the new Yankee 2.0 at http://www.yankee20.com.

Also, like a true Yankee… I’m not paying the $10/year for the automatic redirection. 🙂

Oh, I feel like a corporate tool. Rick Burnes over at 9Neighbors is kicking around this idea for how one could fund local investigative journalism that goes beyond the daily (but still good) work that bloggers and responsible journalists are doing. But can bigger projects make money, without creating a massive bureaucracy of applications for grants? Is a local ad network doable? I must be in corporate mode tonight because I’m not feeling the magic, but I do feel like there is something there. Read his post – linked below… and post your thoughts.

First things first – I have been a shamefully terrible blogger recently. Or I just had nothing to say. So, well, sorry.

Now for the actual post. Our friends at WCMH in Columbus, Ohio, have broken out an interesting use of Twitter to give people a chance to get to know more of the people behind the scenes at the station. More than 20 newsroom staffers have Twitter boxes side by side on the station website, giving people who want to study the daily goings-on a chance to follow along.

Of course, there are a lot of potential pitfalls. Already, you can see some people in the group aren’t updating very often. And it’s not clear whether a page of tweets will get much traffic, if the team doesn’t keep on going with it. But they very well might, and it could give people a little insight into what makes the newsroom tick.

So, my pals at NECN did follow up on their “I Sold My Grandma’s Stuff” scam story that was done first last week. Interestingly, there has been no defense of Joe Perkins (that I know of) there, but I did get one commenter defending him here. It is an interesting case, and I feel badly for those who accuse Perkins of taking advantage of them. The BBB says Perkins’ braggadocio in noting being “featured” on NECN is par for the course for accused scammers. In any case, here is the second story.

So, I am someone who admits that no matter how much I know, that I have a lot to learn about the web, especially in what grabs people’s attention. That’s true in the broadcast world, as well. I mean, if I knew exactly what would bring people to television, I could have stayed an Executive Producer, made a mint and retired.

So, here I am – and last night, I made a rash statement. I said Twitter had jumped the shark with the development of color wars. (Actually, I looked downward, and said, ‘Is that a shark I see?’ which is a slightly wittier way to put it.) My wife, seeing an opportunity, then tweeted that out to a decently sized list of Twitter users.

The silence was deafening.

Today, of course, I am enlightened by Steve Garfield, who points out that it is actually an intriguing little social experiment from Ze Frank, who is a master of social experiments on the web. Here’s his blog about it.

Between the 60th anniversary of Polaroid, its bare-bones emergence from bankruptcy, and the announcement that the company is getting out of the instant film business, there are a lot of reasons to look back and think about all those birthday parties, barbecues and whatnot where someone was waving an instant photo in the air waiting for the image to develop. Mmmmm… birthday cake, burgers, and whatnot. Those were the days. NECN’s Greg Wayland did a nice look back at the history of Polaroid and the end of an era, back when something “instant” took a whole minute to develop.